How We Make Money

Most sites bury this. It belongs in plain sight, because the answer changes how you should read everything else here.

Affiliate commission

When you follow a link from this site to a merchant and go on to buy something, the merchant usually pays us a percentage of the sale or a fixed fee. You pay the same price either way. That commission is our only meaningful revenue.

What that money does and does not influence

Being honest about this requires admitting the uncomfortable half.

It does influence coverage. Merchants with affiliate programmes get pages here. Merchants without them mostly do not, because we have no way to fund the work of maintaining a page that earns nothing. Merchants that pay more get rechecked more often, because we can justify the time. If you are comparing two brands and only one has a page here, commission is a likely reason.

It does not influence what we report. A code that fails at checkout is marked as failing regardless of who pays us. We do not accept payment to describe a code as working, to hide a failure rate, to suppress a negative comparison, or to remove a competitor from a comparison table.

What we refuse

• Paid placement dressed up as an editorial ranking.
• Paid removal of an unfavourable comparison.
• Backdating a verification stamp to make a page look fresher.
• Publishing a code a merchant supplies without testing it ourselves first.

If you would rather we were not paid

Note the code, then go to the merchant directly by typing their address into your browser. The code will still work. We would rather you saved the money than felt obliged.